9 research outputs found
A Block Preconditioner for an Exact Penalty Formulation for Stationary MHD
The magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) equations are used to model the flow of electrically conducting fluids in such applications as liquid metals and plasmas. This system of non-self adjoint, nonlinear PDEs couples the Navier-Stokes equations for fluids and Maxwell's equations for electromagnetics. There has been recent interest in fully coupled solvers for the MHD system because they allow for fast steady-state solutions that do not require pseudo-time stepping. When the fully coupled system is discretized, the strong coupling can make the resulting algebraic systems difficult to solve, requiring effective preconditioning of iterative methods for efficiency. In this work, we consider a finite element discretization of an exact penalty formulation for the stationary MHD equations. This formulation has the benefit of implicitly enforcing the divergence free condition on the magnetic field without requiring a Lagrange multiplier. We consider extending block preconditioning techniques developed for the Navier-Stokes equations to the full MHD system. We analyze operators arising in block decompositions from a continuous perspective and apply arguments based on the existence of approximate commutators to develop new preconditioners that account for the physical coupling. This results in a family of parameterized block preconditioners for both Picard and Newton linearizations.
We develop an automated method for choosing the relevant parameters and demonstrate the robustness of these preconditioners for a range of the physical non-dimensional parameters and with respect to mesh refinement
A monolithic approach for the incompressible magnetohydrodynamics equations
A numerical algorithm has been developed to solve the incompressible magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) equations in a fully coupled form. The numerical approach is based on the side
centered finite volume approximation where the velocity and magnetic filed vector components are
defined at the center of edges/faces, meanwhile the pressure term is defined at the element
centroid. In order to enforce a divergence free magnetic field, a magnetic pressure is introduced
to the induction equation. The resulting large-scale algebraic linear equations are solved using a
one-level restricted additive Schwarz preconditioner with a block-incomplete factorization within
each partitioned sub-domains. The parallel implementation of the present fully coupled
unstructured MHD solver is based on the PETSc library for improving the effi- ciency of the
parallel algorithm. The numerical algorithm is validated for 2D lid-driven cavity
flows and backward step problems for both conducting and insulating walls
Robust Preconditioners for Incompressible MHD Models
In this paper, we develop two classes of robust preconditioners for the
structure-preserving discretization of the incompressible magnetohydrodynamics
(MHD) system. By studying the well-posedness of the discrete system, we design
block preconditioners for them and carry out rigorous analysis on their
performance. We prove that such preconditioners are robust with respect to most
physical and discretization parameters. In our proof, we improve the existing
estimates of the block triangular preconditioners for saddle point problems by
removing the scaling parameters, which are usually difficult to choose in
practice. This new technique is not only applicable to the MHD system, but also
to other problems. Moreover, we prove that Krylov iterative methods with our
preconditioners preserve the divergence-free condition exactly, which
complements the structure-preserving discretization. Another feature is that we
can directly generalize this technique to other discretizations of the MHD
system. We also present preliminary numerical results to support the
theoretical results and demonstrate the robustness of the proposed
preconditioners
Monolithic Multigrid for Magnetohydrodynamics
The magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) equations model a wide range of plasma physics
applications and are characterized by a nonlinear system of partial
differential equations that strongly couples a charged fluid with the evolution
of electromagnetic fields. After discretization and linearization, the
resulting system of equations is generally difficult to solve due to the
coupling between variables, and the heterogeneous coefficients induced by the
linearization process. In this paper, we investigate multigrid preconditioners
for this system based on specialized relaxation schemes that properly address
the system structure and coupling. Three extensions of Vanka relaxation are
proposed and applied to problems with up to 170 million degrees of freedom and
fluid and magnetic Reynolds numbers up to 400 for stationary problems and up to
20,000 for time-dependent problems